Canada and the narcissism of small differences

I stayed up for a few hours last night watching the YouTube stream of CBC's live coverage of the Canadian election results, and as on previous occasions, I just could not wrap my head around this concept the Canadian broadcasters insist on adhering to of "projecting a Liberal minority government" or "projecting a Conservative minority government".  It's fine to project that one particular party is going to form a majority government, because that's a concrete election outcome, but if a minority government is formed, that will always be partly as a result of decisions made after an election.

CBC almost came a cropper in 2008 when they "projected a Conservative minority government", and the Liberal Party then proceeded to sign a coalition deal with the New Democrats and a confidence-and-supply deal with the Bloc Québécois.  The deal then fell apart after the incumbent Tory Prime Minister did a Boris Johnson by proroguing parliament to avoid a vote of no confidence (and unlike Johnson he actually got away with the tactic), but nevertheless you'd think CBC might have learned from that episode.  Apparently not.

The other thing that got on my nerves last night was the way the setback for the Bloc Québécois was reported.  Before the Quebec results came in, the main CBC anchor actually made a number of quite reasonable points about how different provincial Quebec politics are, with the Bloc's sister party (the PQ) still leading polls for next year's provincial election.  She also pointed out that the Bloc are historically resilient and wouldn't be going anywhere even if they lost a few seats.  But as soon as the results appeared, which as far as I can see were bang in line with the pre-election polls with the Bloc suffering moderate but not catastrophic losses, it was suddenly like she was reporting on a Gallic apocalypse.  Every time the Bloc were even mentioned in passing, she went out of her way to say "OH MY GAAAD!  THE BLOC ARE GOING TO BE SO DEVASTATED BY THIS!". It was becoming almost comical.

At least during the hours I was watching, there was no Bloc representative in the studio, whereas the other three main parties were handsomely represented.  That even allowed the Liberal spokesman to utter words he should never have been able to: "all three of us here will be united in our relief that these results are good for those of us who want to keep the country together".  Maybe CBC would argue that the vast majority of Bloc supporters would have been watching their own French language coverage instead, but that's not really the point, is it?  It still leaves English-speaking viewers with a distorted and partial view of their own country's politics.

This will be a familiar pattern to anyone who watched the BBC's UK-wide coverage of last year's general election, which astoundingly managed to cover the SNP's disappointing results without hearing from a single SNP representative for at least the first seven hours or so.  Alex Salmond of Alba was actually interviewed before any SNP representative, probably because he made sure he was in London for the night - but that really shouldn't be the criteria.

By the way, isn't it a rather neat paradox that a Canadian election has just been decided partly on the issue of "sovereignty" and "independence from the US"?  English speaking Canadians have on the whole always been dismissive of any notion of Quebec wanting sovereignty or independence, and yet they culturally have more in common with the US than they do with Quebec.  Does not wanting to be ruled by the US and Donald Trump make them "narrow-minded separatists"?  Perhaps they're belatedly learning not to be quite so dismissive of the "narcissism of small differences" that the former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff used to sneer about.